“The limiting factor to build and scale what you're creating is your ability to synchronize the mental models with reality of what the team is building. … We had breakpoints in the past. We had the code review, the product discussions, the debugging, the bug hunting, all this stuff that forced us to build the mental model. … I think individuals go fast. And I think the limiting factor for teams to go at scale is a shared mental model between product, strategy, tech, design, SRE, and the actual reality of what you've created.”
The Changelog · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026
Context
Put on the spot to coin a hacker law of his own, Kerr gives this answer, which the host immediately named Kerr's Law. It argues that with agents writing code, the bottleneck for teams is shared understanding, not output.
Transcript
Okay.
…mean that you've got some history and some skill and some experience when I say that is what I mean by that. Could you invent a Kerr’s Law (Interview) here right now, given where we're at? Is there a law or some sort of thing on repeat that you can coin in this moment? Or is that too much pressure?
…does. And we had breakpoints in the past. We had the code review, the product discussions, the debugging, the bug hunting, all this stuff that forced us to kind of like, okay, build the mental model. Like, oh, I see there's a thing here. I see there's like a gate here. I see there's a reverse proxy there. I didn't know that before now, but my mental model is close to what the system is. And I think individuals go fast. And I think the limiting factor for teams to go at scale is a shared mental model between product, strategy, tech, design, SRE, and the actual reality of what you've created.
Wow. Kind of just want to pause for a second and just like steep myself in that. Dude, you did a great job. Okay. You were like, no, I can't do that, but you just did it. Okay. You just curse law to us, right? Okay. Let's put that down and make that a law because that's so true. I find maybe this…
Yeah. And it doesn't make for a happy team. I talk to so many engineers and the conversations are always a bit like, you know, when you say, how's it going? There's this kind of like slight grimace of like, yes, it's good. It's good. Yeah, it's good. And they're like, yeah, but it's busy, isn't it?…
I love the fact that you use the word maladaptive versus bad. You know, like someone will say bad, but maladaptive is actually maybe the better term to use in that kind of case because it's like, it's not good or it's bad. It's just like, it's just sort of in there as a different case though. But…
More from The Changelog
